GOP: The party of Internet freedom?

Once champions of the Internet’s Wild West, a re-envisioned movement has left them behind. Now the GOP is digging in its spurs as it seeks to rebrand a party viewed as technology illiterate and gain redemption for backing much maligned anti-piracy legislation.

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It’s also a convenient sounding board for just about everything else.

Internet freedom now gets linked to tax bans, United Nations treaties and small government. Lawmakers have tied the term to everything from Justice Department investigations to American pride. Reinvigorated by the revolt of a region, Web rights have gone on to embody a much broader political agenda.

“People use it for their own purposes,” said Gigi Sohn, co-founder of Public Knowledge, an organization that pushes for open Internet. Republicans especially, she said, take it to mean “absolutely no government, consumer competition protection and no regulation whatsoever.”

Lawmakers see a born fit.

“The Republican Party is a natural for Internet freedom,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), one of the most vocal GOP online rights supporters, told POLITICO.

He noted that it wasn’t the Democrats — whose campaigns have become a wizardry of data analysis and online resources — but the GOP that first established an Internet freedom platform.

Granted, tech advocates had trouble swallowing the party’s opposition to net neutrality standards. And Democrats unleashed their platform just days after.

But as society weighs new questions of privacy and access, the resurging online freedom talk has made for an effective Republican Party tool.

“If you prize Internet freedom, don’t let the government break the Internet,” said House Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise (R-La.) as he advocated against regulation at this month’s State of the Net Conference.

Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) have cast it as a reason to ban additional taxes.

“E-commerce is thriving largely because the Internet is free from burdensome tax restrictions,” Ayotte said when reintroducing a bill that prohibits taxes on Internet access.

And several lawmakers have used online rights as ammunition against their favorite target: the Justice Department.

Issa, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, has demanded an investigation into the prosecution of tech whiz kid Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last month after facing up to 35 years in jail for hacking into a subscriber-only database and taking scholarly articles.

So has Judiciary Committee member Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), whose rifts with Attorney General Eric Holder have turned into legend.

“Mr. Swartz’s case raises important questions,” Cornyn said in a letter to Holder, asking if the prosecution was “in any way retaliation for his exercise of his rights as a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act?”